Save information from MS crash reporter? - windows

On Windows XP when a process crashes, we get a dialog box with a link:
"To view technical information about the error report, click here."
The "click here" link brings up a whole lot of information in a window, but no obvious way to save it to a file. Is there a way? It would be very nice to be able to send that data to several different external vendors we're working with.
The only other option I see in the dialog box is to send it to Microsoft, but this crash is likely not Microsoft's fault and there is no reason to send it to them.

If you are a company, you can register with Microsoft to be able to download WER reports.

As of when you see this dialog box, you should still be able to manually attach a debugger (e.g. Visual Studio) to the crashing process and take a look at any available exception records. Alternatively, I believe you should be able to register Visual Studio to handle these crashes instead of the normal error reporting mechanism. This article seems to have more information about that option:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5hs4b7a6.aspx
Hope this helps...

Maybe a bit late for '08 question, but anyway, you may use Error Report Grabber software for this task

Related

Unable to determine application identity call? How to track down?

I am making a windows phone 8 application and in the designer view in both blend and VS I get "Unable to determine application identity call" error as a dialog box.
From what I read on stack this is propably because of the Isolated Storage is getting run and the designer can't handle it.
I am wondering is there away I can get some line numbers or something where the errors are happening instead of having to manually go through the code?
By the time you see this message box it is already too late, the exception was caught and handled. You have to catch it when the exception is raised. Which is not so easy to do at design time.
One technique that's worth a shot is to use a debugger to debug Visual Studio itself. Start it again and use Tools + Attach to Process. Locate the first devenv.exe in the list of processes and select it. Set the Attach to: setting to "Managed (v4.5, v4.0)" and click OK. Let it trundle to find the PDBs (takes a while). Debug + Exceptions, tick the Thrown checkbox for CLR exceptions.
Switch back to the original instance of VS and do whatever you did before to trigger the error. The 2nd instance will break in when the exception is thrown. Which some luck you'll see your code on the Call Stack window. If the debugger doesn't break then repeat the exercise but attach to XDesProc.exe, the XAML designer. Good luck with it.
Isn't this
Unable to determine application identity of the caller?
or
Getting Unable to determine application identity of the caller Error
are the same topic????
Don't know, just asking...
Sorry for any inconvenience..
Just answered in my basic question.
I'm afraid, i don't know how to get exact string number, just keep in mind that Designer cant have an access to the IsolatedStorage and check all places where you're working with IsolatedStorage. Basically, what you need to do is to add to all constructors a lines
if (ViewModelBase.IsInDesignModeStatic)
return;
If you're working with MVVM Light, or
if (System.ComponentModel.DesignerProperties.IsInDesignTool)
return;
which is pretty the same but without MVVM Light.
Also, i edited my answer there.

VB6 application won't run in some computers, in others it runs fine

I have a VB6 application, the installer is compiled using INNO Setup.
The installer runs fine. But in about 10% of computers when the user clicks the Icon to run the installed app, it doesn't start, no error message, only a Beep sound.
This is happening on XP and also Win 7.
I develop in XP and Win 7 and the application works OK, so I haven't been able to reproduce the issue.
The installer registers all ocx and dlls needed (afaik). (Well not completely all, it assumes MS run-time components should be there, but I guess an error message should show up if something is missing)
I was thinking some kind of user permissions, UAC, but even users in the admin group have had the issue.
Could you point me to what possible issues to look for and test in order to patch the app.
Thanks!
[FOLLOW UP]
Thanks to the tips, found out the manifest is causing the problem. I use it to make the controls look better:
http://www.vbaccelerator.com/home/vb/code/libraries/xp_visual_styles/using_xp_visual_styles_in_vb/article.asp
Now I'm trying to discover why. I have another application with the same manifest and that one works ok.
Haven't been able to get feedback on the event viewer yet.
The "beep crash" often points to an error in an application manifest such as an XML syntax error or namspace conflict. Event Logs will often provide a hint about this.
But I've found that people often try to use the Common Controls 6.0 Library without ensuring proper library loading sequence.
Before any Forms are openend you should load shell32 and then comctl32. The easiest way is a couple of no-op calls in Sub Main:
Option Explicit
Private Declare Sub InitCommonControls Lib "comctl32" ()
Private Declare Function IsUserAnAdmin Lib "shell32" () As Long
Private Sub InitCommonControlsVB()
IsUserAnAdmin
InitCommonControls
End Sub
Private Sub Main()
InitCommonControlsVB
Form1.Show
End Sub
Without this your program will usually work fine in Vista or Win7, but will fail on some XP service pack and patch levels. Part of this is due to changes over time in the Fusion subsystem that handles SxS activation and comctl32.dll patches.
Ignore those saying you need to call InitCommonControlsEx(), it isn't necessary unless you are constructing and using Win32 controls directly instead of VB6 and COM controls.
A few things to try to narrow it down:
Check the Windows Event Log for crash events
Check the Windows Event Log (in the Application section) for crash reports from your application. You can quickly get to the log viewer on Windows XP by clicking Start > Run, typing eventvwr and pressing Enter. On Windows 7, you can type "event viewer" in the search box that is in the Start menu. You can filter the events to only show error events from your program.
You might find a few error events on one of the computers where this problem has already occured, because it sounds like the error reporting feature is turned off on these computers (in which case "hard crashes" like access violations are logged in the Event Log instead of displaying an error dialog to the end-user, as long as a debugger isn't installed on the computer).
Make sure "Error Reporting" is turned at the OS level
As mentioned in the previous section, it sounds like the error reporting feature is turned off on these computers. In that case, a crash won't display any kind of message to the end-user at all and the application will just vanish suddenly. In Windows XP, you can check this setting (and turn it on) as follows:
Right-click "My Computer" and select Properties.
Open the Advanced tab and click the Error Reporting button.
Select the Enable Error Reporting option.
Click OK to all the open windows.
Add trace code to your application
You could also add some trace code to your application's start-up code, such as code to display a message box or write a message to the Windows Event Log or to a log file as soon as your application starts (for example, in the Form_Initialize event of your main form, or in a Sub Main routine).
This way you will be able to tell whether your application is crashing before or after the VB6 runtime is loaded: if you try to start the application and it disappears/crashes, and your startup message isn't logged, then you know it's crashing before it even has a chance to get to your application's startup code, which could indicate that a dependency of the VB6 runtime or the VB6 runtime itself is not installed properly.
Note that Windows XP and Windows 7 both ship with the VB6 runtime pre-installed, but it's possible for misbehaving installers to overwrite or remove files that are part of the VB6 runtime.

Error in BIO read. Program will now exit

A message box periodically pops up with the title "Event Notification Application" and the text "Error in BIO read. Program will now exit"
Can anyone tell me what this error message is about? It occurs in a production environment and I have no idea where it's comming from.
Any clues very much appreciated!
We had this error message on an IBM xSeries and it was caused by the LSI MegaRAID Storage software. Use Process Explorer and check the properties of the pop up.
If it's actually BIO_read (with underscore), then it would be related to OpenSSL. Of course, whoever put the message there might have dropped the underscore - so I'd look for applications using the OpenSSL DLLs (libeay32.dll, libssl32.dll).
I've used Process Explorer to diagnose these issues before: start it when the message is showing, click the bullseye icon on the toolbar and hold it down, then drag over and release when the bullseye is on the target window. The process will be highlighted in the main program area. Also, check your Application event log for errors, and see if you have any services that are set for automatic startup that are not running after you close the error dialog.
For what it's worth, I'd bet this issue is related to an auto-updater for some software installed on your machine. Try to identify those auto-update services (I bet McAfee has one) and disable them for a time (if that's safe.) Only disable one at a time so you can be reasonably sure which one the culprit is; be sure to enable it if it is ruled out.
Best of luck!
Do you have norton installed? It seems to be related to Norton 2000's live update.
Try disabling that and see if the error goes away.
The culprit was some raid software.

Another knack on the "Dialogs must be user-initiated" Security Exception in Silverlight printing

I get the infamous "Dialogs must be user-initiated" Security Exception when I try to print some stuff in Silverlight. As you can see, the dialog is as user-initiated as can be:
John Papa couldn't help me much out neither, because I don't have any breakpoint set. Mr MSDN thinks it could also be that I'm just taking too long, but this is a demo application just as simple as can be.
Any ideas? I guess it's a Visual Studio quirk, maybe some extensions interfering, as things seems to work when I launch the application outside of it. I first thought maybe the Code Contracts are interfering with their IL weaving, but they are deactivated for this project.
Update: This is just a simple Silverlight application that runs locally from the file system. When I do "Start debugging", Visual Studio creates a hosting HTML file containing the Silverlight app in the Debug resp. Release folder of the project, launches the Internet Explorer with that HTML file and attaches the debugger to it.
Update 2: I also get the same error when I create a web project to host the Silverlight app and create a virtual directory for it on IIS.
I might also want to add that I don't have problems with printing in other Silverlight projects regardless of their hosting scenarios.
Update 3: I downloaded FireFox and it works, I don't get the error when I debug with it. So it seems to have to do with my IE8. I uploaded the solution:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10401470/Code/Demos/PrintingDemo.zip
I wonder if anyone can reproduce?
Anyone got an idea to which team I should file a bug report? Silverlight team? IE team? VS Debugger team?
I'm able to reproduce this. You have handled the Click twice, once in XAML another time in code. See your MainPage.xaml
<Button x:Name="PrintButton"
Content="Gotta print 'em!" Margin="8"
Click="PrintButton_Click" />
Don't feel bad about it. I did it last time through a misplaced Print inside a loop.
I've also experienced this strange behaviour. A standard button click event immediately invoking an OpenFileDialog. It would frequently generate the same error when being debugged but would eventually be coaxed in to working when the button is clicked several times.
However when built as a release (or perhaps simply by running the same Xap without a debugger attached to the browser) the problem would go away.
Try to remove
if(SightPaleceListBox.Items.Count > 0)
I had the same problem and found out that the reason was this following line:
cnvsMain.Children.Remove(PrintPagePlaceHolder);
cnvMain is on the page that the user pushed the Print button on (I was trying to remove it from that page in order to add it to the canvas that I was going to print).
My tip: try to comment rows one by one, until you find what row causes the problem. Than try to work around it.

Can you get rid of the "Microsoft Office Excel has encountered a problem" dialog?

You know the one I mean:
Is there a way to disable this?
I'm writing an application to automatically test a large number of Excel spreadsheets which are used in a critical environment. Many of these sheets do crazy things which crash Excel. When Excel crashes I want it to terminate ASAP and without user-intervention.
I definitely do not want to re-start excel.
I do not want the excel.exe process to hang-around waiting for somebody to click on "Don't Send"
And I never never want to report the details of my crash to Microsoft!
It a system service that you can easily turn off
Turn off Error Reporting in Microsoft Windows XP Professional
If that doesn't work go to Control Panel / Admin tools / Services and stop and disable the "Error Reporting Service"
Can you somehow detect that Excel has crashed? You can use TerminateProcess function after that, which removes the process for good. There's an article about it on Raymond Chen's blog.

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